Can I get a hand here, Captain?

“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” Peter Drucker

Late Friday night I was in zombie zone after a long, hard, draining week. Not wanting to flop in bed too early for fear of popping awake in the middle of the night I decided to find something mind numbing on TV. And there it was a Season 1 episode of Star Trek. Who says you can’t find anything to watch with 732 satellite channels.

This was a really early one before Scotty and Sulu where all characters except Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Uhura were strictly death scene bait.

I was struck by how bad the acting really was and how cheesy the effects were but as I watched more I decided it was hard to tell how bad the acting was because of how bad the writing and directing was.

And then the money shot scene (as far as being a catalyst for this post, anyway).

The alien character was split between a “good” one and a “bad” one who were battling each other. Pretty normal stuff. Near the end the “good” alien convinces Kirk he can lure the “bad” one into an area where he can be captured. All he has to do is alter some of the controls on his small space vehicle. When Kirk asks if he can do it the alien says (here’s the good part). “Yes, captain, with your help I think I can do it”. Fade Scene.

New Scene. Alien is up to his neck in wires and modules and Kirk is leisurely leaning against the craft chatting him up. Not holding a spare part, a flashlight, a user manual. ((You can insert your state's DOT stories anywhere along withe way here.) Hell, he could have at least had a bottle of turtle wax and been buffing the panel of the spacecraft with his velour shirt.

Big help. Thanks Jim.

Jeez, how many times have we all had this happen? More importantly, how many times have we been Kirk?

A buddy of mine used to have a great poster of these cowboys riding hell for leather down a hill toward a river with the caption, “Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way”.

Or maybe if you’re the captain it’s “Lead, Loaf, or Lean”.

OK, let's try this one more time

"The reason I talk to myself is that I'm the only one whose answers I accept." George Carlin

I got what’s become my weekly call from an old friend and acquaintance that’s on the job market. It was pretty much déjà vu all over again. No, not that another talented person lost their job, but that another long time friend who I hadn’t spoken to in many months broke The Strouse Manifesto which reads, “The two times you call everyone you’ve ever known is when you get a job and when you lose a job”. He had waited almost two months before getting started. The other part of the Manifesto reads, “Oh, and for the love of God, don’t wait until you lose your job to call people you know”.

Another buddy and I were talking about this over dinner tonight. There’s become this list of mutual friends where our conversations go like this:

Me: “Hey, guess who I got a call from today?”
Him: “Who?”
Me: Jimmy Billy Bob Joe MacDaddy
Him” “Whadda he want?”

Yep, they’ve become a cliché. The only time you ever hear from them is when they want something. The phone call or email come in from good ‘ol Jimmy Billy Bob and you roll your eyes knowing he’s out on the street and now is doing his “networking”.

Networking is a full-time gig and requires calls where you really do only want to know how the other person is doing, or you’re calling to make them aware of someone else being on the street, or you can’t remember if their daughter is graduating this year or next.

Now, let me be evenhanded, you can’t possibly stay in touch with everyone all the time. It’s not reasonable or practical and we’ve all called people strictly because we want something. I'm as guilty as everyone else and I'm sure there's people who will read this and label me a hypocrite. But when over the course of a couple of decades that’s the only time, well, you become a cliché.

People, I’ve preached this before (Tough Talk). Networks are funny things, easy to start, hard to perfect and can be lost from neglect.

So, start today, make a list and start contacting people just to say hello and find out how they’re doing. Note: How they are doing, not you, them.

There’s more but I really have call a couple of people tonight before it gets too late.

WWTD

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?' Don Marquis

A friend was telling me about his latest escapade in the working world where his large company, that became larger by buying his previous large company, was being bought by a yet larger (largerer?) company. The new company uber-large company was promising great and marvelous things….for the investors, and thus were promising 70% downsizing to the rank-in-file.

So my buddy is dutifully going through the job search drill trying to beat the buzzer.

When I asked him how he was holding up his reply was “WWTD”.

“WWTD?”

“Will Work Till Death”

Ah-Ha and Amen.

I read an article a while back that stated that my parents generation – Depression era/ WWII – are the only group in the history of civilization that will get to “Retire”. Prior to them people just worked until they couldn’t go anymore then depended on family members to put them up for their remaining days which was usually a short amount of time.

My parents are in their mid-eighties, in good health, been retired since sixty-five, and are scared to death of running out of money. No one born in the 1920’s dreamed of living so long.

Now come the Boomers, followed by the Gen-X and Gen-Y folks and who knows how long “normal” life spans become and how much dough it’ll take to live outside of squalor.

But I know this, I’m not counting on company retirement plans (hell, the last company I worked for that had one was in the ‘70’s), Social Security (snort), Government programs (snort, snort) or professional investment groups (sn…nevermind).

Nope, WWTD is my slogan (unless I win that Mega Millions jackpot).